From his cellphone in Auckland its captain, Nigel Jolly, said I could sail with him at the beginning of August. He’d need clearance from the British authorities because he didn’t want to jeopardise his contract with them, but there was no problem with the French – he was a friend of the customs officer in Mangareva. Vic Young, great-great-great-grandson of the mutineer Edward Young, who went to Pitcairn with Fletcher Christian, would be a passenger too. I rebooked flights with Harold Wing – a flexible return to Tahiti and a five-Polynesian-island pass. But Jolly was never there when I phoned and didn’t respond to my messages. I decided to try to sail to Pitcairn from Auckland on a cargo ship, though this would mean bureaucratic scrutiny, a licence to land and the cost of again changing tickets.
Disclaimers and conditions on the Pitcairn Council application form for a licence seemed designed to discourage. Licences were rarely granted. Anyone who landed without one was liable to a fine of a thousand dollars. The Council accepted no responsibility for damage or loss of property, personal injury, accident or death during any visit or while landing or departing. Return travel arrangements were a matter of chance and visitors might be marooned for months while waiting for a ship. Charter yachts from French Polynesia were prohibitively expensive. There were no hotels, banking facilities or medical services on the island. Licensees must be of good behaviour and obey the island’s laws.
I cited an interest in Pitcairn’s flora and fauna as my reason for wanting to visit. Herb Ford of the Pitcairn Islands Study Center in Angwin, California, had advised me not to mention anything about writing books. ‘I must warn you’, he wrote, ‘that if you brag in any way of your authorial feats you may be escorted summarily off the island.’ I wondered how this could happen in the absence of a ship.
Shirley, the commissioner’s personal assistant in the Pitcairn Office in Auckland, was discouraging about shipping from New Zealand. It had never been more difficult. The once trusted P&O liner no longer sailed. There was a cargo ship in September but no free berth on it: Pitcairners returning home and officials had priority. The company Seatrade New Zealand took all bookings and she never knew until three or four weeks before departure if there was any space. There might be two small cruise ships, Amazing Grace and Clipper Odyssey, calling at the island, but all was vague.
Verity said the journey wasn’t meant to be and I should find a calmer approach to life. I thought that if Bligh had been calmer with Christian and made him feel valued, perhaps he wouldn’t have found himself in an open boat at the edge of life and at the mercy of the violent ocean. He’d have taken the pot plants to the West Indies, then they’d all have gone home to Deptford.
Still I longed for a ship and the wide sea. I went on preparing as if a journey was assured. I bought a medical kit, water purifying tablets, Deet and Imodium, a silk vest, a compass, a woollen hat and a dual-faced clock that told the time in two chosen parts of the world.
On a morning when I was thinking of something else an email came from the Pitcairn Office in Auckland. Shirley had news, she wrote, that would turn my day upside down. A supply ship, the Tundra Princess, was leaving the port of Tauranga in seven days. There was a berth on it. It was carrying a cargo of kiwi fruit to Amsterdam via Panama and it would make a brief stop at Pitcairn to unload supplies for the islanders. I should email my passport and credit card details if I wanted to go. I’d need warm clothes, wet-weather gear, stuff for seasickness and something to do on the journey. ‘There’s a lot of water to cross,’ she wrote. She’d book a hotel for me in Auckland. I should get to Tauranga by 26 June, but the crew wouldn’t load the kiwi fruit if it was raining. She again warned there was no assured passage off Pitcairn. On two occasions people marooned there had been so desperate to leave they’d paid Seatrade, at great cost, to divert a ship to pick them up.
I phoned mother and told her I was going on a journey. Good, she said, would I bring her back some smoked salmon. It was a long journey, I said, to the other side of the world, to a remote island in the middle of the Pacific and the nearest large land mass was New Zealand. Why did I want to do that? she asked. I said it was to do with my work. Her rejoinder was that I didn’t know the meaning of work and how was she supposed to manage if I went off to New Zealand?
I said a good thing about her having several children was that we shared the load, the others would look after her while I was gone, but it was a worry to us all that she shooed away professional carers and lived alone under siege in a house she could no longer manage. She replied that no agent of the devil would drive her from her home. Did I remember her Georgian glass tankard, her Lalique vase, her Cobra green claret jug, art nouveau decanter, perfume bottles, case of stuffed birds, Millefiori paperweight, blue enamelled carriage clock, Chinese ivory snuff bottle, her Liberty sideboard? All were now chipped, smeared, marked and vandalised.
I tried colluding with her paranoia. When did this person call? I asked. She didn’t know, she hadn’t been out, the doors were locked, the windows too. I began to think that no island was remote enough for the journey I hoped to make, that my quest was for departure and not to reach a destination, that I
